The Indian finance minister, Arun Jaitley, on Monday announced a budget aimed at ensuring the benefits of growth were more widely shared, while reiterating that amidst slowdown in global growth and trade, the Indian economy has held its ground firmly.

Jaitley, delivering his second full-year budget since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s landslide election victory in May 2014, said fiscal deficit for financial year 2016-17 is targeted at 3.5 per cent.

The Finance Minister announced new rural aid and health programmes.

The Finance Minister vowed 100 per cent village electrification to be achieved by May, 2018.

He reiterated a forecast that the economy would grow by 7.6 per cent in the fiscal year that is drawing to a close.

Jaitley on Monday in the Indian Parliament listed $16 billion in government measures targeted at rural India, including spending on a job creation scheme, farmers’ welfare and building of rural roads.

He targeted a total of $130 billion in credit to farmers.

The Finance Minister also said India will not resort to retrospective taxation in the future.

T N Ninan, editor of Indian daily Business Standard, said it was heartening to hear the Finance Minister’s assurances on maintaining fiscal discipline.

“Budget speech has several references to the poor, none to the neo-middle class that was the govt’s earlier focus,” Ninan said.

An overhaul of economic data has propelled India to the top of the league of fast-growing major economies.

The stock market on Monday gave a thumbs down to the budget.

Immediately after the budget taxation proposal announcements were made, the Sensex crashed over 600 points and Nifty was down over 200 points.

Auto stocks fell steeply as Finance minister Arun Jaitley in his Union Budget 2016 speech on Monday proposed to increase the cess on passenger vehicles by up to 4 per cent.

57 founding members, many of them prominent US allies, will sign into creation the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on Monday, the first major global financial instrument independent from the Bretton Woods system.

Representatives of the countries will meet in Beijing on Monday to sign an agreement of the bank, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. All the five BRICS countries are also joining the new infrastructure investment bank.

The agreement on the $100 billion AIIB will then have to be ratified by the parliaments of the founding members, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing in Beijing.

The AIIB is also the first major multilateral development bank in a generation that provides an avenue for China to strengthen its presence in the world’s fastest-growing region.